What does it mean to follow Jesus Christ, and to be part of his church, in this day and age? We often feel we are up against awesome obstacles as we seek to be faithful to Christ today We know we have immense challenges as a church in faithfully witnessing to the love of Christ in our world today.
When Christians are faced with issues like those, we go back to the old stories. Today we read the story from the Book of Acts about the healing of Tabitha (also known as Dorcas). It is a rather lovely story, and it seemed appropriate for this service today, just before our Annual Meeting, for it tells us some deep truths about what it means to be a Christian, and how the church ought to be- not just back in the first century, but today. And since we are still in the season after Easter, it’s a story which reminds us that we are Easter people.
We are not told very much about Tabitha, but we are told that she was ‘a believer’. If someone had to use one word to describe you, would that be the word, I wonder- are you a believer? When we join the church, we quite often have to say that we believe certain things- about God, Jesus, the Spirit etc. These matters of doctrine are important- and yet we know that faith is not simply a matter of saying you believe in certain facts. If I say that ‘I believe in God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit’, that’s not like saying, ‘I believe in gravity’.
For a Christian to say they believe in God is a bit like a soldier who might say, ‘I believe in my commander. He may be taking me into danger, it might be risky- but I trust him’. When we say we believe, it’s really about trust. That’s why Christians can sing, ‘The Lord’s my shepherd’- here’s someone we believe in enough to follow even through deep, dark valleys.
Jesus uses the language of sheep and shepherds in our Gospel reading today. ‘My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me’ he says. Apparently that’s exactly how shepherds operated in ancient Israel. They didn’t have sheep dogs- the shepherds spoke to the sheep. Often a number of herds might be mixed up on a hillside, but sheep would follow the voice of the one they knew was their shepherd. The one who is known, the one who is trusted, the one whose voice we recognise- he is the one we believe in. For Christians, Jesus Christ is that shepherd, for he says, ‘The Father and I are one’- his word is the word of God for us.
We live in a cacophonous world. We are surrounded by voices- our friends, our family, colleagues, but also voices from the radio and TV and the Internet, entertainers, politicians, rogues and saints who all want us to listen to them and to follow them. To believe in Christ is to hear his voice through all the noise and nonsense- a voice we can trust to see us through life and even through death and into eternity, as he says to us, ‘I give [you] eternal life, and [you] shall never die’.
‘You shall never die’ is a strong statement to make. The Apostle Peter is visiting a nearby town when Tabitha dies, and her friends ask him to come and visit. What happens next is perhaps stretches our credulity, for this is a miracle story, and many of us find such stories hard to believe. But it is a story which is very touchingly told. When Peter arrives, he goes into her room, and just as Jesus did on similar occasions, he sends everyone out of the room. Then, he ‘knelt down and prayed; then he turned to the body and said, “Tabitha, get up!” She opened her eyes, and when she saw Peter, she sat up. Peter reached over and helped her get up’. Peter puts this terrible situation into God’s hands. He obviously thinks that God is not quite finished with Tabitha in this life. And when she does get up, he is there to very tenderly help her.
Whatever the origins of this odd story, it speaks strongly of the early Christians strong belief in resurrection. They remembered that Jesus promised eternal life: ‘You shall never die’. They knew that their faith was grounded in the miracle of Jesus’ resurrection. Those first Christians were Easter people. When all else seems to have failed, Peter’s prayers and care bring resurrection- life from death. Just as Jesus did for the daughter of Jairus. For this Jesus, in whom we believe, is a resurrected Lord and Saviour.
‘You shall never die’, says Jesus. A promise of eternal life, but also a promise of new life in other ways, in times when we think we can see no life. The Christian church in Western Europe is having a very difficult time today. The world seems to be changing too fast for us to keep up. We are very challenged because patterns of church life, patterns of worship, ways of speaking about faith which seemed effective even very recently no longer cut the mustard. Our culture seemed, in the past, ready to at least pay lip-service to the voice of Jesus Christ. But now that cacophony I spoke of a moment ago, all those other voices, seem often to overwhelm, or contradict, the voice of the Good Shepherd.
There are plenty of people who will say the church is dying. But resurrection is at the heart of our faith. Death is never the end, for Christians. And so I believe that even if there are aspects of our familiar church life which seem to be ending, which seem to be dying, perhaps that’s because new things are being born. We believe in Christ, so we believe in renewal and resurrection, life springing up out of seeming death.‘Now the green blade riseth from the buried grain’, says a wonderful English hymn of the twentieth century (borrowing a metaphor which Jesus himself uses elsewhere in John’s Gospel (John 12:23-24). And the hymn writer notes that the resurrection is something which Christians can experience now:

When our hearts are saddened, grieving or in pain,
Thy touch can call us back to life again;
Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been:Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.[1]

Fair chuffed with this wee video! Jamie Stuart wis a kirk elder at Carntyne when I was the meenister. He'd the dead brilliant idea of pittin the Wurd intae his mither tongue. We a' miss the wee man! #InternationalMotherLanguageDay https://t.co/YERJICiw4i